Tiivistelmä

Revenue management has become more and more popular within new industries and also the M&E sector has started to adopt some revenue management practices in order to overcome decreasing demand and eroded profits. Kämp Group, which is the commissioning party in this thesis, is interested to find out how they could apply revenue management into meetings and events. Moreover, Kämp Group is interested to study their customers perceptions to those practices. Hence the aim of this thesis is to find out to which extent Kämp Group’s customers are willing to utilize possible outcomes of M&E revenue management.

In the first part of this thesis similarities and differences between RM in the M&E sector and other industries are compared. Although some similarities also exist, the largest differences can be found within internal assessment and pricing. Furthermore, the literature discussed especially B2B customers’ perceptions to hotel RM.

The survey is conducted as quantitative research using conjoint analysis. SSI Web from Sawtooth Software was used to formulate the questions and the results were collected from Kämp Group’s M&E customers during summer 2014. Furthermore, the results were analyzed SMRT program. Conjoint analysis was chosen as the method since it is not widely used in hospitality field and it can provide new insights to which attributes of M&E pricing are of most importance for customers.

The results indicate that Kämp Group’s M&E customers are not willing to utilize RM practices in forms of discount. Monetary benefits have minor or no effect at all in the behaviour of M&E customers. On the other hand, if e.g. 3 day change and cancellation policy is offered, customers are willing to pay significantly more for the meeting. Moreover, traditional meeting package, which is currently offered widely in Kämp Group, does not attract customers as much as meeting room rent including only technical equipment would attract. Therefore Kämp Group should consider offering alternative and more flexible options to customers in order to drive more demand.